In 2024, along with 20,000 others, I attended a sold-out metal show in Manchester. Unlike most concerts at the Co-op Live Arena, however, none of us in the packed-out venue knew who we were actually seeing. The band was Sleep Token – a masked and anonymous collective formed in London in 2016, now selling out arenas across the UK and the US with their distinctive blend of progressive metal, indie pop and trap.
A few months later, I stood among thousands to watch the Swedish band Ghost, famous for dressing as a satanic clergy led by their masked frontman Papa Emeritus. Their show was an extravagant parody of religion. Theirs was an entirely different performance of concealment from Sleep Token, but one just as emotionally charged.
Then, earlier this year, I found myself in a concert hall on the outskirts of Antwerp, Belgium. In a room filled with billowing smoke and illuminated only by the snap of strobe lighting and a single candelabra, I watched the death-metal outfit Dragged into Sunlight thrash and shriek through their gloriously misanthropic album Hatred for Mankind. Once again, I had absolutely no idea what they looked like.
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In a cultural moment where visibility in popular music is at its zenith – where all eyes and screens fixate on Taylor Swift’s Eras tour or Oasis’s long-awaited reunion – something interesting is happening in the metal scene. Metal musicians are refusing to reveal their identities, names and faces, or (in the case of Dragged into Sunlight) even acknowledging that they have an audience at all, by playing with their backs to the crowd, and never speaking between songs.
Rock and metal musicians have concealed their identities before, of course. Kiss and Alice Cooper strut the stage in elaborate makeup. Slipknot and Gwar perform in grotesque masks or full-body costumes. And the use of “corpse paint” (skull-like facial makeup) and occult pseudonyms is par for the course in certain kinds of Black Metal, an extreme offshoot of heavy metal, characterised by shrieked vocals, tremello guitar playing and Satanic imagery.
However, anonymous metal bands such as Ghost, Sleep Token and Dragged into Sunlight draw attention to a paradox – concealment is what gives their performances their emotional power.
Researchers of the “affective turn” in social science argue that emotion isn’t just something we have; it is something that moves between us. Cultural theorist Sara Ahmed describes affect – those intensities that we feel, often before we fully know what we’re feeling – as “what sticks”. Affects are the energy that circulates between people, objects and ideas, binding them together.
As literary critic Raymond Williams has noted, affect often emerges before it’s fully articulated – inarticulate, but powerful. This is precisely what is at play in anonymous metal bands. When performers hide their faces and identities, they strip away one of the most recognisable cues in performance. In that absence, the audience and listeners become part of the emotional work – projecting, imagining and collectively generating meaning.
My research, due for publication next year, draws on ideas from affect theory to explore how hiding a performer’s face or identity creates new ways of generating shared emotion. Anonymous metal bands show how concealment itself can become a tool for feeling.
How bands use their anonymity
In the case of Sleep Token, the effect is a sense of both devotion and intimacy. Sleep Token’s lyrics explore spiritual and religious experiences, desire (both sexual and for connection) and vulnerability. Yet, at the same time, their lyrics are often ambiguous.
The lack of clear meaning, along with a lack of identity among the band members, leaves space for audiences to interpret and process their own emotions – even those that they cannot fully verbalise. Evidence of this is clear in Sleep Token’s active digital fanbases, where frequent posts on a Reddit fan page attest to how the absence of identity becomes a conduit for intimacy.
In the case of Ghost, concealment lends itself to irony and parody. Ghost presents itself as a kind of Satanic clergy, with their front man, Papa Emeritus, playing the part of a Satanic pope-like figure, flanked by masked musicians, known as the “nameless ghouls”. This rather menacing presence is a means of satire. Ghost mocks the bureaucracy and power dynamics of the Catholic Church, promotes self-discovery, consent and mutual pleasure, and keeps its tongue firmly planted in its cheek. Ghost’s anonymity, then, takes the austere and the totalitarian, turns it on its head, and creates a space for fun, transgression and communal ritual.
If Sleep Token’s anonymity invites connection and Ghost’s invites laughter and collective joy, then Dragged into Sunlight weaponises their lack of identity.
Unlike the other bands, Dragged into Sunlight doesn’t wear masks, but instead performs with their backs to the audience, in poorly lit stages filled with billowing smoke. Their music, which blends black metal, death metal and grindcore, is blistering, chaotic and misanthropic.
By refusing to acknowledge the crowd and refusing to adopt clear identities, Dragged into Sunlight’s music – which focuses on mass killing, cruelty and social disarray – pummels the audience with pure affect. It consists of overwhelming volume, deafening distortion and indecipherable screaming fury, underpinned by a rigorous contempt for the subject matter of their lyrics. There is emotion here, but it is stripped of empathy, a kind of anti-performance that paradoxically heightens the experience.
Across these examples, concealment produces different emotional registers – intimacy, joy, rage – but in each case, it’s what makes feeling possible. These bands remind us that emotion doesn’t always depend on recognition. Sometimes it’s the very act of not knowing that allows us to feel more deeply. The face, once the centre of performance, gives way to atmosphere, sound and sensation.
Perhaps that is why audiences respond so strongly to these bands. In a world obsessed with being seen, they offer the relief of not being known – the freedom to lose yourself in something larger.
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